Is Anything Happening? Page 4

  I have never been quite sure what to make of a man who has no apparent objection to being made to look like a war criminal. He was well aware that many believed he was guilty of war crimes for his role in the US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, but he was also the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, so perhaps that meant more to him than the lighting for a BBC television interview.

  Editors love it when they land an interview with a major world figure. With luck, it will get the name of their programme in the newspapers, and clips from their interview will feature on the news bulletins. Immense effort goes into arranging these interviews, although, if truth be told, they do not often yield genuinely interesting insights. I would not want to pretend that I did not enjoy meeting world-famous politicians, but I was not so keen on the enormous stress that accompanied the entire interview process, and the absurd and unnecessary hoops that we had to jump through before getting to see the object of our desires.

  Political leaders lead busy lives, with every minute of their day controlled by all-powerful diary secretaries. When unexpected events disrupt their schedule, interviews with BBC broadcasters can often be the first casualty, no matter how many months in advance the arrangements were made, or how many phone calls and emails have confirmed that the interview will take place.

  So my default position before every major interview was: ‘It probably won’t happen.’ I am not a natural pessimist, but I prefer to be proved right than to be disappointed. I once spent an entire day in Kiev sitting outside the office of the then Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko waiting for a promised interview. Every time her office door opened, she would see us sitting there and smile apologetically. At the end of the day, we were told, ‘Sorry, there just wasn’t time.’

  In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, we had been promised an interview with the country’s strongman Prime Minister Hun Sen, a man who was notoriously unwilling to be interviewed. I was more than usually sceptical, but his office repeatedly confirmed the arrangements. It was only as we were getting into a taxi to drive to his office at the appointed hour that they called to cancel. ‘So sorry, the Prime Minister is unwell.’

  ‘Will he be better tomorrow?’

  ‘No. We don’t know when he will be better. So sorry.’

  In Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, we were promised an interview with the then President, Olusegun Obasanjo. Again, I was sceptical, but at exactly the appointed hour, he swept into the room where we had been waiting and did the interview.

  I interviewed him a second time some years later, just after a deeply flawed election during which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Ballot papers were not ready in time, and those that had been printed by polling day often failed to get to the polling stations. Lines of voters were turned away when officials ran out of ballot papers, and there were – as always in Nigeria – widespread allegations of fraud.

  The President readily acknowledged that it had been an imperfect process but was still in ebullient form. He was, I think, one of Africa’s more impressive leaders – far from perfect, to be sure – and it is arguable that he failed to deliver what so many Nigerians still hope for: an end to corruption and a reliable electricity supply. In what should be one of the continent’s wealthiest countries, it really ought not to be too much to ask for.

  On the other side of Africa, in Uganda, one of the world’s longest-serving leaders, President Yoweri Museveni, first elected in 1986, also promised us an interview. There was one condition: it would have to be conducted at his ranch, about a five-hour drive from the capital, Kampala, and we would have to be there by 10 a.m. Setting out before dawn for an interview I never expected would take place was not my idea of the glamorous life that foreign correspondents are supposed to live – but we made the journey, and, to my surprise, we got the interview.

  There had been an earlier condition that needed to be met as well: the President’s foreign media adviser, a former international cricketer called John Nagenda, had challenged my producer colleague, David Edmonds, to a tennis match. The deal was that the loser would buy dinner at a restaurant to be chosen by the winner. Mr Nagenda (always Mr Nagenda, never John) was by then in his late sixties but still prided himself on his physical fitness. I suggested to Dave that perhaps this was one tennis match it might be politic to lose.

  In the spirit of comradeship, I should not have been as relieved as I was when Dave pulled a muscle in his leg in the second set and had to retire hurt. We duly bought Mr Nagenda dinner in a fancy Chinese restaurant and in return he invited us to a traditional open-air Ugandan feast a few days later. He also generously provided a picnic lunch for us while we waited patiently on the lawns of President Museveni’s ranch. It included ham sandwiches, which Dave politely declined. ‘I’m afraid I’m a vegetarian, Mr Nagenda. And I’m also Jewish.’

  Our host professed himself shocked. ‘Are you a homosexual as well?’ We decided without exchanging a word that this was neither the time nor the place to be offended, so we let it go.

  Unlike Obasanjo, Museveni did not enjoy being interviewed and had little charm. He did not like being pressed on why he kept standing for re-election, especially when I ventured to compare him to Nelson Mandela, who had stood down after just five years in office. Museveni’s response was: ‘You do not change your doctor when you are in the middle of treatment for cancer.’ In his eyes, he was the doctor, and Uganda was the patient. Next question.

  I have tried over the years to work out what, if anything, all these powerful men have in common. Admittedly, my assessments are based on only fleeting impressions, half an hour, maybe an hour, in their presence, always in the semi-formal setting of an interview for broadcast. Nevertheless, I have reached some conclusions.

  With rare exceptions (Museveni being one of them), they have an element of magnetism in their character. It is a form of charisma, an ability to appear interested – and interesting, at the same time, so that whoever they are with wants to hear what they think. Most of them, even those with a reputation for political ruthlessness, also have a degree of charm that can be disarming.

  When I met President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, I described him as ‘a charming provocateur’. To his critics, he was one of the most dangerous politicians in Latin America – he was close to Cuba, Libya and Iran, and an implacable enemy of the United States. But to this BBC interviewer, he was a pussy cat, having carefully read his briefing notes ahead of time so that he could demonstrate his impressive familiarity with my CV.

  His security people, on the other hand, were not so charming. After we had set up our makeshift TV studio in his Paris hotel suite, they peremptorily threw us out so that they could sweep and swab every last bit of our equipment to ensure that there were no concealed explosives. Even the earpieces – one for me, and one for the President so that he could hear his simultaneous interpreter translating my questions – had to be checked. Charm and paranoia are not always mutually exclusive.

  Another unlikely charmer was the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The first time I met him was at an Islamic conference in Kuwait in 1987, when, true to his reputation as a night animal, he summoned a select band of Western correspondents for an impromptu post-midnight press conference.

  ‘Why don’t you all introduce yourselves?’ he suggested, as we sat round a giant oval-shaped table. ‘Tell me where you are from.’ I described what happened next in a piece I wrote after his death in 2004.

  In turn, we each named our home town and the publication or broadcast organisation we represented. ‘No, no,’ he grinned. ‘Where in Jerusalem do you all live?’ This was guaranteed to make us feel distinctly queasy. It was true that many of us were indeed based in Jerusalem, but it was not something we were keen to admit to, as no Arab state other than Egypt in the 1980s would accept travellers from Israel – hence, frequent overnight stops in Cyprus and hasty swapping of passports. Score one to the Chairman.2

  Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I often sensed a
degree of semi-concealed menace when I encountered world leaders. Behind the eyes, there seemed to be an unspoken warning: ‘Don’t forget who I am. Don’t mess with me.’ The trick was to remember the advice supposedly given to a newly elected MP, terrified at the prospect of facing the baying mob on the other side of the House of Commons: ‘Imagine them in their pyjamas.’

  And, of course, as a journalist with a job to do, remember what that job is: to ask the questions that need to be asked, and insist, where possible, on a proper answer.

  Even Nelson Mandela conveyed some of that ‘Don’t mess with me’ aura. Yes, he had charm by the bucket-load, but he knew who he was, and what he represented, and he certainly did not like being messed around or kept waiting. Which, unfortunately, was exactly what happened when I flew to Johannesburg in August 2001 to record an hour-long programme with him and his wife, Graça Machel.

  For some reason, it had been decided to record the programme in London rather than in Johannesburg. That meant establishing a satellite link – and satellite links are notoriously unreliable. Mandela’s time was precious – he was already eighty-three years old and in poor health – and for an hour-long programme we had been allocated … one hour.

  He and his wife arrived precisely on time, introductions were made, they sat down, microphones were attached, and: ‘Shall we start?’ ‘Not yet,’ came the voice in my earpiece. ‘We haven’t got the link yet.’

  Believe me, making small talk with the most admired man on the planet is seriously nerve-racking. Fortunately, I had recently met his former comrade-in-arms Denis Goldberg, who had been one of his co-defendants at the Rivonia trial in 1964. (Goldberg was the only white defendant in the trial and had been the first to be released from jail, in 1985.) I was therefore able to tell Mandela a bit about Goldberg’s life in London, where we were near neighbours. He was gracious and understanding, but I knew that the minutes were ticking by, and I dreaded him getting up at the end of our allotted slot, leaving us with an embarrassing hole to fill. When we finally got going, I decided to plough on regardless, blithely ignoring our supposed stop time, until his much-feared personal assistant Zelda la Grange stepped in to make clear that our luck had run out.

  We were still several minutes short, and I never found out how the BBC managed to fill the resulting hole in the schedule. In my experience, there are some questions that it is better not to ask.

  Was I nervous when I met these global titans? Of course I was. Was I intimidated or cowed? No, because I believe that interviewers are automatically equipped with a special suit of protective armour. It is invisible externally, but it exists inside their heads. This special suit enables the interviewer to break all the usual rules of social intercourse: you are allowed to ask rude questions, you are allowed to interrupt, and you are allowed to be a major pain in the backside. You are invincible in your suit of armour.

  If I could choose whom to interview, I would always prefer writers and historians over politicians. The writers are usually articulate and have interesting things to say about the world we live in, and the historians are often able to make sense of it all by referring back to what has happened in the past.

  So, for example, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah. I interviewed her after she had given a lecture in London about the novelist’s craft, which she defined as turning facts into truth, so I thought it would be interesting to contrast the way that novelists tell stories with the way journalists do.

  ‘If you and I were to witness the same event,’ I asked her, ‘and then each of us wrote about it, how would our accounts differ?’ She looked across the studio desk and smiled.

  ‘People would be moved by what I wrote; they would be informed by what you wrote.’3

  I still think a lot about that distinction, and I still envy the novelist’s ability to convert facts into truth.

  The bread and butter of any BBC news presenter’s job is interviewing British politicians. The truth – how can I put this? – is that most of them are not people with whom I would choose to go on holiday. I did not buy them lunches, or drinks – and I don’t think I have ever exchanged a Christmas card with anyone who has the letters MP after their name.

  Fortunately, there are a handful who come close to being fully functioning human beings. The former Tory Chancellor Ken Clarke has always been a man who clearly enjoys life, both in and out of politics, and he was perfectly happy to be regarded as a normal human being. I once interviewed him immediately after he had been interviewed by a colleague from the BBC Radio 1 news programme Newsbeat. ‘Ah, The World Tonight,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘I’d better try to get it right this time.’ It was certainly less than complimentary about Radio 1’s listeners, but at least it seemed to show that he was not taking himself too seriously.

  Mo Mowlam, the Labour former Northern Ireland Secretary, was another minister who gave every impression of enjoying life, even though throughout her time in office she was secretly suffering from the brain tumour that eventually killed her, at the age of fifty-five, in 2005.

  At one Labour Party conference, when I was due to interview her live some time after 10 p.m., she turned up half an hour early. ‘You’re rather early,’ I remarked. ‘I’m also rather drunk,’ she replied, ‘so you’d better find me some strong coffee.’

  I often felt that one reason why politicians sometimes seemed reluctant to appear on the programme was that it meant they would have to go easy on the vino during dinner.

  Another possible reason was given, although not to me personally, by another former Labour minister, Peter Mandelson. According to a newspaper colleague, who later gleefully recounted the conversation to me, Mandelson observed that although he enjoyed appearing on The World Tonight, ‘I always feel as if I am talking to myself.’ (The insult was entirely undeserved, as far more people usually tune in to The World Tonight than to, for example, Newsnight or Channel 4 News.)

  Some politicians are simply rude. Robin Cook, the Labour Foreign Secretary from 1997 until 2001, was a man for whom I had considerable respect, but he had a notoriously short fuse. Interviewing him once at an EU summit, I was less than thrilled when, after a perfunctory couple of minutes, he turned on his heel and walked off with the words ‘I think that’s quite enough, don’t you?’

  The early-twentieth-century American journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken came up with an admirably pithy way to describe how journalists should approach politicians: ‘Journalist is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.’ I have always found it an extremely useful axiom to keep in mind.

  And perhaps this is as good a place as any to put to rest one of the most enduring myths of contemporary British journalism. It was not Jeremy Paxman who pioneered the idea that interviewers encountering a politician should always ask themselves: ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ The earliest reference I have come across is in the memoirs4 of a great former Fleet Street figure, Louis Heren, who rose to become deputy editor of The Times. He described how, during the fuel crisis of 1946–47, when he was a young reporter, he asked a colleague from the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, for some advice before interviewing a senior government official. The response was: ‘Always ask yourself why these lying bastards are lying to you.’ Heren added: ‘I still ask myself that question today.’

  Heren also spelt out the essential mindset for any decent reporter:

  If death is to be the last enemy, for all reporters the enemy on earth is authority. He comes in many guises, benign, authoritarian, democratic, elitist, populist, ideological, stupid or just plain nasty. He can stand at the dispatch box in the House of Commons or above Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. He can sit in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington or in the TUC headquarters in London. He is the enemy because he holds, and can seek to deny or falsify, information the reporter wants. What is more, what he says often has to be reported, including the half-truths and prevarications. To that exte
nt he holds the high ground and dominates the terrain.

  It is as true now as it was when Heren wrote those words. Two examples: the first is from the time in the 1990s when the post-Thatcher Conservative Party was tearing itself apart over Europe. I was interviewing two Tory MPs from opposite wings of the party, men who were known to disagree with each other about virtually everything. As soon as the interview was under way, it became clear that they had agreed beforehand that they would form a united front – try as I might, I failed to entice a single murmur of disagreement from either of them. As they left the studio, I heard them sniggering: ‘Well, that wasn’t what he expected, was it?’

  On another occasion, we had been tipped off that the former Conservative Cabinet minister Cecil Parkinson was making himself available to say some disobliging things about the way a successor was implementing a particular policy. In the studio, it was a different story: he lavished his colleague with generous praise and paid tribute to his skill and sagacity. As he left, he apologised: ‘Sorry about that, I just felt he needed a bit of support.’

  Sometimes, the lying bastards lie.

  There are a few politicians who seem genuinely to enjoy the cut and thrust of debate and who are happy to engage with an interviewer without necessarily sticking to their party’s same old talking points. David Willetts, David Blunkett and Menzies Campbell are just three whom I would always enjoy talking to, not because I always agreed with them but because I knew there was a good chance that they could provide light rather than heat on whatever was the topic under discussion. (And I hope you noticed how old BBC habits die hard: without even trying, I have named one figure from each of the three main UK political parties.)